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Wednesday, July 20, 2016

On Tuesday, July 19, the second day of the 2016 GOP convention, Donald Trump, the inexperienced, inarticulate, potty-mouthed, dubiously reputable business man turned anti-government carnival barker officially became the presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

Surreal as that nomination appears, even in the topsy-turvy world of 21st Century Republicanism, it came about because the Party hardliners were helpless to stop it. The people--their people--had spoken. Unwittingly, unintentionally, they had managed to churn up their portion of the masses so effectively they made it easy for a fast-talking charlatan like Trump to pounce on this most golden of opportunities, winning vast numbers of hardened hearts and brainwashed minds.

Trump's early showing in the polls, hard as those rising numbers were to believe, gave the party regulars plenty of time to go through the seven stages of grief (disbelief, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression, and acceptance), put on their happy masks, bite the bullet, and rehearse their lines. ("It could be worse! It could be Hillary!") From the beginning, Trump made it clear he wouldn't be needing them to win. He had a history of smashing people who got in his way. These guys would not be immune.

Fast-forward to the convention: It would be a Trump family affair, make no mistake. Trump would be the decider and it would be a show like nothing the world has ever seen outside of Hollywood or maybe Siam. Party platform, that boring old thing, would have to take a back seat to the main event--the coronation of The Man.

What to do, what to do? Talking up Trump is hard, especially when he wasn't their first, second, third, or even seventeenth choice.

Aha! Hillary! Of course!

Both Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, the titular heads of the Republican Party, gave speeches that barely mentioned Donald Trump. Celebrities like Willie Robertson, the "Duck Dynasty" star, and Chachi (Scott Baio) took up the slack, praising Trump to the highest skies, knowing for an absolute fact that Donald Trump will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

But the award for Best Preview About How It's Going to Be had to go to Chris Christie, Donald's chief-enforcer-apparent, who took to the stage and whipped the crowd into a frenzy with a speech that had nothing to do with Donald Trump (mentioned only four times by name, once in a sentence that went like this: "But this election is not just about Donald Trump."), and even less with fixing the state of the nation, focusing instead on a bizarre, cringe-worthy mock trial of the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, one Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, lying to the American people about her
selfish, awful judgment guilty or not guilty? [Guilty!]

Time after time the facts,
and just the facts, lead you to the same verdict both around the world
and at home.

In Libya and Nigeria. guilty! [Guilty!]

In China and Syria, guilty! [Guilty!]

In Iran and Russia and Cuba, guilty! [Guilty!]

And here at home on risking America's secrets to keep her own and
lying to cover it all up, guilty! [Ditto!]"

Throughout Christie's speech the crowd never let up. The cameras caught their snarling mob-faces, their raised fists, their calls for Hillary's head: "She's guilty! Get her! Lock her up!"

I thought about Arthur Miller's 1953 play, "The Crucible", ostensibly about the Salem Witch Trials but in reality an allegory reflecting the mood of the times--the Red Scare, the McCarthy hearings, the many lives and careers ruined by one man on a mission to make a name for himself by creating fear where there was none. (Three years after his play was produced, Miller himself was brought before the committee and ordered to name names of communists he might know. He refused and paid the price.)

So how did Christie's speech strike the press, the ever-vigilant press, the press so ready to protect our freedoms they're still reporting on the controversy over Melania Trump's plagiarized speech? Barely a nudge. They reported it as if it were a typical speech at any old political convention.

So it wasn't just the speech that horrified me, it was the reaction--or the non-reaction--of both the public and the press. We've been here before. Once the McCarthy era fires burned out and the ashes cooled we vowed "never again".

Saturday, July 2, 2016

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our
civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our
duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair
inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with
toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them
to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of
infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should
suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to
be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." ~
Samuel Adams

Somewhere
along the way we stopped calling our most popular summer holiday
"Independence Day" and went simply with "The Fourth of July". We love
our Red, White and Blue, but this is the day we pull out all the stops.
Flags fly everywhere, the stars and stripes adorning everything from
porches to paper plates to Uncle Sam hats to the holiday advertising
pages of every newspaper. Flags dress floats and bicycles and baby
carriages in every parade in every little town in America.

We love this day--the day to remember our liberty, our exceptionalism, our prosperity. Those were the days, weren't they?

So what happened?

Not to be a downer on our favorite summer day, but I can't
shake the feeling that "independence" is one of those words we're
starting to look back on with nostalgia. Does anyone even care that
we're not that independent anymore?

Our dependence on foreign oil and on anti-American big business and on
the production and importation of goods from dubious nations across the
globe is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they declared us
an independent country and gave us our working papers.

It started on July 4, 1776 when 56 men signed a paper declaring the independence of the thirteen united states of America from Great Britain, the mother country. ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.")

Eleven years later, in 1787, a constitution, the wording hard-fought and
brainstormed to death, became the law of the land. The Preamble read like this: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more
perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,
and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States
of America.

They didn't start off with, "We, the wealthy landowners, in order to
keep our fiefdoms going. . .", or "We, the 39 undersigned, in order to
preserve our station and ensure a healthy profit margin. . . ".

No, they began it like this:

WE, the people. . .of
the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution
for the United States of America

It came out of a yearning for independence so strong an entire nation was created, and in the course of a couple of centuries we
became a model for democracy throughout the world--a force to be
reckoned with. You couldn't find a prouder nation anywhere. We were
going places.

That was then.

Today,
we're in turmoil. It's as if the promises made, the lessons learned, the
reasons to form a more perfect union are long gone and long forgotten.
We are as divided as we've ever been since the days of our Civil War,
150 years ago. We cannot, it seems, find common ground. We see our
America through different eyes, with different fears and different
goals. We don't like what we see, but from entirely different angles
and for entirely different reasons. We try to interpret what our
Founding Fathers had in mind for us, but we come at it with our own
biases, our own prejudices, trying to mold our purposely vague
constitution to fit our own wants and needs.

But on this one day we come together, and it's our love of this beautiful, challenging, imperfect country that brings us to detente. It's a day when, no matter what's going on outside, the sun is warm, the breeze is balmy,
and the shade of the old oak tree brings a delicious coolness. A
lemonade day. A day for feeling good. The parades are about to start and
there is no more beautiful flag in the world than the American flag.

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From Political Loud Mouth

"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a Liberal."

-John Kennedy

Any Other Questions??

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Written by Lawrence O'Donnell and spoken by Jimmy Smits as Matt Santos on The West Wing

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What's going on here:

This is the site of a die-hard Democrat and a proud liberal woman. I care, I cry, and when I do I don't become a snowflake, I become a warrior.

Donald Trump, yes, THAT Donald Trump, is the President of the United States and the idea of checks and balances has been filed under "quaint". The Constitution is tattered and torn. Hand-wringing has become a national pastime.

After 10 years of this, I thought I might retire to the Shire, but, no...

The mountains are high and I am small, but Donald Trump is the president and that's just not right.

I trudge on.

Ramona Grigg, Writer, Fighter, Dreamer.

(The door is always open and I love company, but haters will need to do it somewhere else. We're all grown-ups here.)